All regimes have their confiscations,
Thus by edict thy made them dumb:
Shudder children, and do not dream their names,
Mandelstam who grovelled for names,
Ahkmatova and Pasternak who crept their poetry
Past factories where lists were spun,
Past foremen fat with budgets of lies,
Through queues of relatives who came with stooped hearts
To whisper their litanies of names,
Past the basilica of small consolation.
In the wintered sabbath the Russian world held still;
Hoar-frost crackled on the seeming weight of bells.
In the city mothered by churches
The tongues cleave to their bronze palates,
Such is the frozen time,
And people glide like mythic ghosts
Through Novodevichy,
Past smelted worthies,
Where Gogol preens in stone
And chasuble of handsome snow,
And the marble bust of Mayakovsky
Is tediously harangued by crows,
And angels in fur-boots breathe their names
And set the icy tip of Tolstoy’s well aglow.
Through widow birches still they drift
Past martyrdoms set in walls
With infants propped
on sleds, sweet afterthoughts in tow,
Beneath the towers of the recent states
Still gangstering the avenues;
By small festoons of cousin bells
and cathedrals mute with Christmas -caps of blue.
In their cold penury, seasoned in mistrust,
In the doom of the twelve-mile bell,
They by-pass their dreams of Bethlehem
Enduring on a bulletin of spring.
Icon-still is the night.
In deep-chested sanctuaries
A din of mourning basses;
And, above the church of the Annunciation
The compline of a hosting moon.
Now, when love still comes with shoulders hunched,
And night teems with rumour and device,
The darkness yields to their risk of words,
And they are transfigured in their resonance
In voices deep with grace:
A Magnificat of bells.